Civil rights leaders say the Nashville lunch counter sits-in early in the civil rights struggle were instrumental in ensuring student demonstrators across the South would embrace nonviolence.

“Nonviolence had worked for the Montgomery bus boycott, but people were asking ‘Can it work again? What’s the next stage?”’ said the Rev. James Lawson, speaking Thursday at a forum ahead of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

Lawson was a divinity student at Vanderbilt University when he began leading a series of nonviolence workshops for student leaders. They culminated in the 1960 sit-in protests that led to the successful integration of Nashville’s lunch counters.

Civil rights leader Diane Nash, who also spoke at the forum, said that later that year students from across the South met for a conference to discuss how to move forward.

“At the time, Nashville was the only city that had desegregated its lunch counters,” she said, “so the conference was able to see that nonviolence works.”

Lawson was one of the drafters of the mission statement for the new Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that formed at that conference. Nonviolence was incorporated into the name as well as the mission of the group.

“Nashville was the reason that the whole Southern civil rights movement was nonviolent,” Nash said.

Lawson went on to become a Methodist pastor in Memphis, where he led the sanitation workers’ strike that in 1968 brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to town, where he was assassinated.

Asked how the demonstrators found the courage to challenge racial segregation, knowing they could be jailed, beaten or killed, Nash spoke of the humiliation she felt going to downtown Nashville after coming from her native Chicago to attend Fisk University. At the time, blacks could order food at the lunch counters, but had to take it to go and eat on the streets.

That humiliation gave her the courage to seek an end to segregation. And the knowledge that her fellow students were trained and willing to put their bodies between her and someone trying to hurt her gave her confidence, she said.

Nashville’s lunch counters integrated soon after Nash led a march to the plaza near City Hall and got Mayor Ben West to admit that he thought segregation was morally wrong.

Lawson said the courage the student civil rights leaders showed is innate in everyone.

“We diminish our lives by being afraid to face crisis,” he said. “We discover dimensions we never dreamed of when we are prepared to engage in the struggle of life, to face uncomfortable places and find ways to move through them.”

Lawson went on to equate the civil rights movement with the American Revolution, saying it sought to expand government by the people and for the people. And he urged the audience to continue that work by pursuing opportunities for every boy and girl to live up to his or her full potential.

Page 2 of 2 - The forum was sponsored by Nashville law firm Waller to celebrate King’s life and leadership.